[Takashi]

For the record, the only printers ever to print in forms correctly were the needle-types with the holes in paper and stuff from the 80's. Injet printers are the worst offenders, but a half-decent laser printer will hit it right 95% of the time. Since black and white laser printers are stupid cheap nowadays, I can't recommend one enough for office work.

That said, OpenOffice also has a Illustrator clone called OpenOffice Draw that is free.
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[Takashi]

Despite what LaTeX writers might tell you, there are other, more practical (and popular) markup languages for text that doesn't require mathematical equations. In fact, OpenOffice (and Office 2007) both use XML-based document markup languages under the WYSIWYG guise, and professional writers have used FrameMaker "structured" mode for years to style and create technical documentation, normally under the DocBook schema.

InDesign has a couple of tools for that, in the sense you can create a InDesign "style sheet" that is applied to whatever XML you feed it. So you can create a look for a magazine, and all the writers have to do is to send XMLs in, that they can generate in several levels of geekiness.
This sheds some light into it, albeit it's fairly light threaded.
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